Greece:
Papandreou at the top of “Lagarde list”?

“The 'Lagarde List' has prompted another furore,”announces Les Echos reporting allegations in the Greek press that the country’s former prime minister, socialist George Papandreou's mother holds the biggest Swiss bank account on the “Lagarde List.”

Les Echos continues —

…the 2,000 Greeks with Swiss bank accounts who feature on the List, which was obtained by French authorities from a former employee of HSBC and passed on to Greece in 2010, have yet to be prosecuted.

According to the weekly To Vima, a highly placed official in the Greek ministry of finance told the judge investigating the list that Margaret Papandréou, aged 89, is the owner of an account containing €550 million registered with the Genevan branch of HSBC. The newspaper adds that the account is in the name of employee working for a Greek fund administrator based in Tel-Aviv. The Papandreou family have rejected the allegations and announced that they will sue for libel. In response to this threat, To Vima argues that the Papandreou family would do better to reflect on exactly why the list disappeared when George Papandreou was in office. At the time, his finance minister said the list had been mislaid!

Update 4 December:

According to eKathimerini, Nikos Lekkas, the Finance ministry official at the centre of press reports linking Mrs Papandreou to the List, said "he never received an official version of the Lagarde list and could not have named anyone on it.”